The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for searching data for display on a display device. More particularly, but not exclusively, the present invention relates to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) which help a user to-search for desired elements of data.
GUIs commonly use a window to display data, the window having one or more associated scroll bars. The scroll bars normally form part of a border of the window and have sliders movable by a user along the length of the scroll bar. Such movement of the slider results in movement of the data displayed in the window.
Scroll bars are used when all the data will not fit into the window. If, for example, the data is a list of items, then part of the list is displayed and the scroll bar used to move the list relative to the window so that all parts of the list data can be viewed. In this way a small window can be used to view large sets of data.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,550,559 discloses a GUI with a scroll bar for displaying lists of data. The scroll bar background displays an index to the list of data. Each line of the list of data elements is represented by an element in the index. The slider is also sized to cover the elements in the index whose corresponding data elements are currently displayed in the window. The index in the scroll bar enables the user to move the data in the viewing window so as to display desired elements.